Journal

Journal is a clean and minimal personal blogging theme for WordPress. Here you can view Journal documentation and setup guide. Here are a few easy steps you need to follow in order to make your website looking similar to our demo site.

Getting Started

Once you have activated Journal, you will now have to ability to customize the theme using the WordPress Customizer.

Code

Journal code structure is a standard coded website. Changing or editing code should be pretty straightforward.

Menus

Journal supports WordPress 3+ Menu navigation functionality. To use the built-in WordPress menus systems go to Appearance > Menus. Once you are on the menus page, create a menu name (Located at the top with a text field). After you have successfully created a menu name in the left column you will see a box titled Theme Locations. Select the menu you have just created then save it.

Now to add menu items to the page you should see a box titled, Pages. Under the pages panel, you can select pages to display in your menu. This menu supports up to 1 level drop-down menus, allowing you to nest your menu items 1 level deep.

Widgets

Journal supports WordPress 3+ Widgets. To use the built-in WordPress widgets go to Appearance > Widgets. To use a widget on your site, simply drag the widget into the Panel Area listed on the right-side of the page.

In the Journal theme demo, you may have noticed the Instagram posts used in the widget area. To add a similar feature to your blog simply add the Instagram Feed plugin to your WordPress site.

Customizer

Site Identity

The site identity option have 3 options.

Site Title

Tagline

Site Icon

1. The first option Site Title allows you to specify the name of your blog.

2. The following field tagline allows you to add words or a brief description about yourself or blog.

3. The final options `Site Icon` allows you to choose an icon as your site’s favicon.

Note: A favicon is a small icon that appears on a tab when you are visiting a website.

Header Image

The header Image options allows you set a background image to the header background.

Menus

The customizer Menus options allow you to specify a menu to use for your website and also allows you to add, remove, or arrange current menu items in real time.

Widgets

The customizer widget option allows you to add or remove widgets right from the customizer page. This allows you to see the newly added widget in real time.

Homepage Settings

Allows you to set a custom homepage to your blog. Journal does not come with additional homepages.

Theme Colors

The theme colors option gives you the ability to change the color of your blog. If you do not like the default colors, simply alter them via this option.

Additional CSS

The additional css field allows you to add custom css to the theme.

General Setting

The general Settings option has 5 options.

Avatar

Copyright

Scripts

Pagination

1. Avatar

The avatar option allows you upload an image for your blog. For the best results, your image should be of the same height and width ratio (125×125, 250×250 etc). The avatar section also allows you to add a display name to your blog along with a description.

2. Copyright

The copyright option allow you to specify the copyrighted footer text for the Journal theme.

3. Scripts

The scripts option allows users to add tracking or analytics code to their WordPress blog.

4. Pagination

The pagination options allows you to choose between various page scroll techniques such as older/newer posts, page numbers, etc.

Social Networks

The social networks section allows you to add your social networks profiles to Journal. Enter your social network url for your accounts and the theme will take care of the rest. For example, our twitter username is radarthemes so I would put https://twitter.com/radarthemes in the twitter box.

Social profiles do not appear without enabling them. To enable them simply go to Manager, listed at the very bottom of the sections and select the display social media icons in the left sidebar.

Post Options

The post options setting allows you to customize posts depending on their type. There are a total of 3 options.

Background Color

Change the background color of a post (only valid for the front page and not the post-single page).

background pattern

Add a background pattern to your post by simply uploading a background image. To get started you can find patterns here.

Hide Post title

If you would like to hide the post title for a specific post type then you may do so by checking the `Hide Post Title` checkbox(only valid for the front page and not the post-single page).